[wp-hackers] Best practices for plugin with complicated settings?

[Peter Westwood]

On Mon, July 26, 2010 8:11 am, Carl Roett wrote:
> My team is currently working on the BuddyPress Media plugin
> http://code.google.com/p/buddypress-media/  (previously known as BP
> Album+)
>
> At present, we have 207 configuration settings consisting of mixed data
> types (bool, int, string, object) that we're storing to a single WP
> option.
> This number is probably going to increase to around 400 settings by the
> time
> we're finished. Total stored size in the DB about 4K. The settings rarely
> change after the admin has completed initial setup.
>

My first response to this is - Do you /really/ need that many user
configurable options.

Consider making some decisions about how the plugin should work and more
some of them to only be configurable using filters so that in the rare
case where someone does need to change one of those settings they still
can.

Cheers

westi